Juliette Gréco, French concert and recording star, dies at 93

Juliette Gréco, an acclaimed French chanteuse whose sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star, died Sept. 23 at her home in Ramatuelle, France.

She was 93 and was one of the last links to Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist intellectuals who made her their raven-haired, black-clad muse in the post-World War II bohemia of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. Her death was widely reported by French media, but information on the cause was not immediately available.

In her music, Gréco conveyed an intense world-weariness that was a bittersweet reflection of her life. She had been on her own from the age of 16, when the Gestapo deported her mother, a member of the French Resistance during World War II, to a concentration camp.

Gréco made her way to Paris and kept company with writers and artists, including Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Cocteau and Albert Camus. They held court in smoke-filled bars and cafes until dawn and adopted Gréco as one of their own. Her spellbinding voice, husky and intimate, moved Sartre to write songs for her, calling them “lusterless” words that became “precious stones” in her mouth.

Gréco also turned heads with her looks - her high cheekbones and her deep-set, almond-shaped eyes. Leading French photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau captured her as an incandescent, waifish beatnik, the embodiment of Left Bank chic.

Onstage, she was wild, tangled tresses, kohl-rimmed eyes, sleek black pants and turtleneck sweaters. “You moonbathe while others sunbathe,” Pablo Picasso reputedly told her, a reference to her alabaster skin against her jetblack ensemble.

Gréco had leading roles in European and American films in the 1950s, though Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, one of her lovers.